On the cover

'Century Of Women' Charts Quest For Justice

June 05, 1994|By Nancy Jalasca Randle. Special to the Tribune

The six-hour documentary "A Century of Women" (7:05 p.m. Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday on TBS) is to women's rights what Ken Burns' documentary is to the Civil War: a comprehensive and moving record of women's quest for justice from 1900 to the present. Coming on the heels of the '80s when sisterhood gave way to "every woman for herself," it is a reminder that no woman did or does stand alone.

FOR THE RECORD - Editor's note: Maya Angelou was erroneously described as a poet laureate; the article has been corrected.

"Women" uses letters, memoirs, archival film, photographs, and interviews to retrace the events of the most significant era of social change in the history of women. Jane Fonda provides overall narration. Fifteen of America's most prominent actresses-Glenn Close, Meryl Streep, Jodie Foster, Angela Bassett-give voice to the historical figures. On-camera interviews include First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, poet Maya Angelou, and feminist leader Gloria Steinem (this sentence as published has been corrected in this text).

The documentary airs in three segments. "Work and Family" analyzes this enduring conflict in women's lives. "Sexuality and Social Justice" surveys women's efforts to control their physical and political destinies. "Image and Popular Culture" traces the changing image of women.

A fictional narrative interwoven throughout is directed by two-time Oscar-winner Barbara Kopple. Each section provides passageway to both the past and the present, reinforcing a sense of progress and putting the issues in perspective.

It is easy, for instance, to forget that the impetus for reproductive freedom did not begin with a desire for the right to abortion. It began with a desire for the right to live.

Between 1910 and 1925, 300,000 women died in childbirth. That's more than all the men who died in all the wars from the American Revolution to World War I. The filmmakers take us from the tragedy of these women through the triumph that came when birth-control pioneer Margaret Sanger smuggled the first diaphragms into the United States in French brandy bottles.

"A Century of Women" contains dozens of these unfamiliar facts and forgotten stories. At the center of these benchmark events, are America's everyday heroines, ordinary women transformed by the movement into leaders. Women who chose a life of relentless determination over one of quiet desperation.

The story of African-American Tina Hill speaks eloquently to the crowning victories of these invisible guardian angels who paved the way. Hill migrated to California from Tyler, Texas, to work at North American Aviation during World War II. One of three million women who went to work in defense plants, she was an unlikely candidate for a 37-year career in the industry.

While still a teenager, Hill went to work as a maid, the leading occupation for blacks in the '30s. Her mother was a maid. Her grandmother worked in the fields. Her paternal great grandfather was a slave, a carpenter who bought his freedom and purchased 70 acres of land for his family.

Stories of Great Grandfather Crawford inspired Tina. She had a dream. "As a child, I went to the mailbox everyday. It was a nice chore; you was all alone and you could stop and think. I thought someday I'm going to be in somebody's history book. I'd tell people that, and they'd start laughing. So I had to stop talking."

When Hill's employer's brother suggested she move to California to find a better way of life, she began saving money. Her salary was $3 a week. After rent, clothes, food and 10 cents a week for life insurance, she squeezed out a small nest egg. She did sewing on the side to boost her stash.

Two years later, a 21-year-old Hill climbed aboard a greyhound bus with a one-way ticket to the golden state. She had $15 in her pocket.

In 1943, after the Negro Victory Committee created opportunities for blacks, Hill landed a job at North American doing benchwork: assembling small parts for bombers. Her starting salary- 40 cents an hour-was five times her income as a domestic in Texas.

"You don't know what that was like," she recalls, still a little awed by her fortune. "It was like the roof floating off the house and the sun coming in. I knew I was out of the white woman's kitchen forever."

Born on the same day as Richard Nixon, she calls herself "Tricky Tina." Ultimately, Tricky Tina earned $10 an hour, married, gave birth to a daughter, and bought three houses in her lifetime. Hill, now 76, lives in a two-story gingerbread-style home in the mid-section of Los Angeles. Purchased in 1959 for $18,500, it's worth $300,000. She beams with pleasure as she points out her shiny hardwood floors and her French furniture.

In mid-May, Hill left this roomy house she shares with her daughter and granddaughter for a trip. "They're flying me to the East Coast to appear on the Donahue show and to be on Larry King," she reported in a telephone call a few hours after a three-hour interview in her home. "I don't understand it. It's beyond my wildest dreams."

If it were possible for Hill to meet Gloria Steinem, the feminist might tell her what she tells viewers in the documentary. "Everything we do matters. And it matters not only now, but it matters in the long term."

Tina Hill didn't set out to change the world, she simply went in search of a decent way to live. But in the course of making her trip-to-the-mailbox dreams come true, she did something that mattered. She became part of a chain of progress that binds women of the past to women of the present. "A Century of Women" forms another vital link in that continuing process.